Heterodox argument: a big part of the reason JavaScript has been so successful is that interpreted languages actually can be extremely fast—competitive with, and in many cases, faster than compiled languages, with V8 arguably the fastest interpreter in existence.
See this post by Mike Pall, author of LuaJIT (which is comparable to or faster than V8 performance-wise, despite being basically a single-developer project), which explains why: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180603053407/http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/75426" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20180603053407/http://article.gm.... Basically, it’s much easier to add high-quality runtime-trace-aware recompilation to a JIT interpreter, which a non-trace-aware compiled language will often not be able to beat.
It's mostly fast enough for most apps and that definitely helps. It's not as consistently fast as some languages that don't rely on an JIT. That matters more for tooling than your average website.
msteffen · · focus · HN ↗
See this post by Mike Pall, author of LuaJIT (which is comparable to or faster than V8 performance-wise, despite being basically a single-developer project), which explains why: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180603053407/http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/75426" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20180603053407/http://article.gm.... Basically, it’s much easier to add high-quality runtime-trace-aware recompilation to a JIT interpreter, which a non-trace-aware compiled language will often not be able to beat.
skybrian · · focus · HN ↗